Boosting Ecommerce Skills With External Resources

For January 2021, we’ve been using the theme of “Ecommerce Team Building & Management for Growth”. Last week we covered ‘Managing Ecommerce Teams for Growth’ and related to this, this week we’re covering:

“Boosting Ecommerce Skills With External Resources”

Using external resources is an established practice in ecommerce. There are many reasons why a business will invest in agencies, freelancers or consultants including:

• Buying in specialist skill to accelerate speed to market
• Complimenting in-house teams to boost capacity
• Up-skilling internal teams to improve capability
• Providing interim cover for key roles e.g. maternity/paternity leave

Ecommerce demands such a broad range of skills and specialisms that it’s hard, and impractical, for most businesses to recruit all of these in-house. Often a skill is required for a short period of time, for example the set-up of a new datalayer and tag management solution for a website migration, therefore investing in an external specialist is the most cost effective solution.

However, using external resources brings its own set of challenges, for example ensuring they add value and compliment your existing team skills.

On today’s chat, we’ll explore what these challenges are and discuss how ecommerce businesses can make the most of their investment.

There will be a few conversation starter questions as always:

1. When does an ecommerce team need external support, and why?
2. What are the risks of bringing external people into the business and how can they be mitigated?
3. How do you ensure the use of external specialists boosts internal skills?

We’re sure we’ll end up covering much more!

Thanks, James & Dan.